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Understanding 9/11Representing Ireland : literature and the origins of conflict 1534-1660
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Representing Ireland : literature and the origins of conflict 1534-1660
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- 1993
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Reviews
(1)
Reviewer:
Porlock
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November 6, 2018 (edited)
Subject: Extra-Ordinary Essays from 1993.
Subject: Extra-Ordinary Essays from 1993.
Though written in 1993, the substance of these essays remain topical on a day when a Unesco report authored by two Irish professors suggests the likelihood
...
of a return to violence in Northern Ireland https://senatormarkdaly.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/unesco-professors-report-on-return-to-violence.pdf
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/a-united-ireland-could-need-four-referendums-says-expert-1.4016125?mode=amp
So, do Historians of Ireland past and present have a special duty of care to publicly comment so far as their discoveries impinge upon the present? How much have things changed since 1993 when these essays first appeared?
Representing but not representative.
A wonderful collection of essays wherein Irish historians and English literary critics patiently examine the way writers in the 16th and 17th Centuries such as Spenser, Milton, John Davies, and other commentators, settlers, adventurers, and administrators describe[d] and/or represented Ireland and the Irish AND how it was that political expediency, personal ambition, unquestioned stereotypes and personal integrity inclined them to depict Ireland in a manner that suited them or their class, their conscience, or their political masters.
Probably NOT to be attempted without first reading Spenser's View of the State of Ireland, Pauline Henley's book on Spenser in Ireland, Ware's Introduction to Spenser, and any other historical background (Sir John Davies, Barnaby Rich, Googe) that will assist the reader's efforts to understand the period under review. After reading these books, Christopher Highley's 'Shakespeare, Spenser and Ireland' will further help to fill in the gaps, literary and historical. Andrew Hadfield's biography of Spenser and Nicholas Canny's 'Making Ireland British' are key texts (as is the work of Willy Malley and Brendan Bradshaw, editors of this book along with Andrew Hadfield).
For those who survive these works, Nicholas Canny's very readable (no footnotes 1983) 'From Reformation to Restoration' (which I have just begun) offers a more detailed analysis of what Gaelic Ireland looked like and sounded like during the period 1534-1660. If you can keep up with it, Canny's book should be read before these essays as it provides a kind of 'how we live now' of the Pale/Gaelic Ireland conjunction, critical to understand precisely what and where these essays are referring to, but if you don't know your Leitrim from your Longford, stick with the list mentioned earlier.
What emerges from these essays is an impression, limned in the Introduction, that English representations of Ireland were (or are) in fact 'English' representations of Ireland (sic), -an object-relational great-leap-forward for those in the business of deciphering what happens when two people meet or when two countries interact.
Though peripheral in many respects to the larger British Isle, Ireland remained intermittently central to British foreign policy. England's treatment of Ireland always had international, mainly European dimensions to it; the Act of Union for example was precipitated by the French Revolution, while the Emancipation Act (and the tabling of several Home Rule Bills) was eventually repealed (with the help of the Irish born Duke of Wellington) to contain or forestall a larger crisis. The invitation to William of Orange to rule England (the Glorious Revolution) had its origins in establishment fears of a return of a Catholic monarch.
In my opinion, Cromwell didn't go to Ireland to kill Irish people but to kill supporters of a Catholic King, supporters who happened to be Irish. It's an important distinction, not to mitigate Cromwell's guilt but to cast the conflict as a religious one. Ireland only discovered it was Catholic when Henry VIII declared England Protestant.
So, English identity has for eight hundred years been shaped in ways by its engagement with Ireland as its Significant Other, a by and large acrimonious marriage with both parties rarely on proper speaking terms, neither yielding to shows of power and neither willing to concede to the truth that no matter how much you may like to blame the other party, it is still your marriage and one without the possibility or provision of divorce or geographic separation.
-So far as drawing practical conclusions from these essays is concerned, conclusions that might speak to an improved Irish-British relationship in the present, the result of applying what one has learned to the complicated way different communities view each other, the lay reader is left to his or her own devices to divine solutions and imagine remedies that might relate to 'the origins of conflict' of the book's title.
It is roughly twenty six years since this book appeared (1993) and while the Good Friday Agreement of 1999 has brought a peace that has held, the prospect of a return to violence is very real as Brexit, the UK's decision to leave the European Union, has seen the possibility of a return of a physical border separating Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland.
-The editors of these fine essays felt obliged to mention 'the origins of conflict' in the title of this book but once mentioned, it appears, felt obliged not to mention them again...
Here we see history as it merges with the present. and the limits which historians are bound by so far as commenting on the present is concerned. So, the reader is left to do the heavy lifting to try to make sense of these essays as they relate to the state of play in Anglo-Irish relations today.
Symbiosis.
A phrase which helps to explain this object-relational anomaly / paradox (the one mentioned earlier) is that 'What is socially PERIPHERAL is POLITICALLY and symbolically CENTRAL, (to paraphrase Christopher Highley). This represents a profound truth. The injunction 'to do unto others' is, as any owl will tell you, as much about self preservation as it is to maintain good relations with ones neighbours. When we open our mouths to speak of objects in the world, we tend to say more about ourselves than we do the objects which are our targets.
In other words, what we say about others may indite ourselves, even where, as William Blake pointed out, 'a truth that's spoken with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent'. It isn't enough to have or possess the truth. It's what you do with it that will define you or your country over the long haul.
A concept first muted (I believe) by Sir John Davies in his remarkably frank and propaganda free (insofar as this is ever possible) commentary on English involvement with Ireland, is that successive English armies, viceroys, commanders were never given the sustained support they needed to subdue Ireland permanently, referring obliquely to how it was Elizabeth's administration always had one eye on those she sent to Ireland for fear that they would build their own power base there. The number of political and military careers that faltered or foundered or ended in Ireland is a great many more than might be expected. Essex, Perrot, Grey, Strafford, Raleigh were all part of the Irish enterprise. In other words, controlling Ireland wasn't just about controlling Ireland. It was indeed also about controlling Irish lords, the Butlers, the Ormondes, the Desmonds, the Boyles, the O'Neills, the O'Donnell's, the Burkes, O'Briens, and the FitzGeralds.
For the novice reader or person yet unfamiliar with the substance and content of these demanding essays (demanding in terms of things the reader is presumed to know) Gustave De Beaumont's much neglected book on 'Ireland, social, political and religious' offers a remarkably refreshing and largely dispassionate (non partisan except perhaps on the issue of the Reformation) account / overview of Ireland's history. Writing outside of the Anglo Irish sphere and in French, his straightforward narrative is a revelation in that, perhaps, he never seems to have to couch his language in terms acceptable to two constituencies.
It is a detailed book but which presumes little knowledge on the part of the reader, (in the same manner that his friend and travelling companion Alexis De Tocqueville managed in his study 'Democracy in America', and 'L'Ancien Regime', a study of the pre 1789 generation in France).
Beaumont's explains that Ireland's traditional lack of a central authority made it relatively easy for others to invade, yet that same power structure, the lack of a tradition of central authority, determined that it remained difficult to govern.
Beaumont seems to have consulted John Davies a lot but, writing for a different, more general audience, makes a real effort to assume little on the part of the reader whereas Davies is writing home as a civil servant to and for an informed audience.
Litton Falkiner's (early 20th C) essays on Ireland provide both general and specialised views of Ireland which are frank and fair. A moderate Unionist, his work might be read alongside John Pope Hennessey's (sometimes 'Hennessy') a moderate and reform minded Catholic who inter alia takes Raleigh to task for his contribution to Ireland. (John Eglinton's work is also very useful).
This leads to the question of historic objectivity with regard to the writing of history. The British historian EL Carr's 'What is History' insisted that historians are unavoidably prone to bias whether in their selection of materials or their interpretation of events. This may not seem like a revelation today but enshrining this finding as a maxim or will not and has not prevented historians of all ages from overstepping the mark. His is an interpretive guidebook, a book which advises historians to beware of their own tares, motes, and discursive stratagems.
I have no issue with individual historians who have to toe editorial lines but at some point the levee will break. If historians fail to connect evidential malign and pernicious socio-political representations to the origins of conflict, with a view to their prevention or curtailment in the present tense, the men of violence will continue to write their own history...
Historicism as a method or practice, as it is currently configured, omits any insistence of an 'Historical Present' in its five pillars (See Greenblatt and Gallager's 'Practicing Historicism'). I believe that Historicism, to become the effective method it aspires to be, must at least permit a more active public policy role for historians (as public intellectuals).
Today, to offer one telling comparison from the field of literary criticism, it is a universal lament to criticise the limited scope of what was known as New Criticism, an orthodox approach to literary texts popular in trans-Atlantic academia until around 1970, where the limited activity of 'close reading' was its touchstone and staple diet. The movement and its adherents refusal to countenance other readings, its insistence on upholding its position with respect to what it called 'the pathetic fallacy' prevented literary critics from drawing upon other supporting informational sources (biography etc.) to buttress or augment its investigation of texts.
I believe any limited methodological orthodoxy will go the same way New Criticism went, now seen as a narrow self serving methodology operated by and for literary Brahmins and grandees.
To take one practical example or potential application; currently, there is no functioning government in Northern Ireland (900 days and counting) as the marching season continued to perpetuate ancient stereotypes by parading sectarian banners as, meanwhile, soi disant Irish nationalists deface English language signposts around Ulster. It is one thing for historians to identify and lament the futility of demonising the Other as this series of essays lays bare but another thing entirely to do little about it.
We have something called Applied Chemistry and Applied Psychology but do we also need Applied History?
Surely, a group of wonderful essays such as these could include within its remit some neutral consensus driven commentary on the relevance of their essays to the historical present, (even if written in 1993). While I respect the limits imposed upon the various actors involved in this literary-historical enterprise, it seems misguided that the past cannot speak to a better future.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/12/loyalists-celebrate-victory-after-belfast-council-tried-to-ban-bonfire
I suggest this with the awareness that a prominent Irish historian currently (2019) advises the British government regarding the appointment of suitable persons to the British House of Lords; representatives who will no doubt play some role in Britain's 2019/2020 Brexit negotiations/debates with the possibility of a return to a closed border in Northern Ireland. I trust all is well with this selection process but today (18/08/2019) with the BBC's role being questioned/scrutinised in the press (Guardian et al) regarding questionable impartiality on the subject of its coverage of Brexit, it will be interesting to watch whether the media or academia play a more involved part in preventing the return of violence. That is what is at stake. Coverage of protests in Hong Kong and Belfast or Derry or Ecuador are not quite the same thing.
The port cities of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland the South East (London) are being taken out of the EU by a minority of the overall population who represent a slight voting majority in the 2017 referendum vote (Ag.49%-For 51%), threatening a return of the Northern Ireland border as the Conservative/Tory Party has a Confidence and Supply agreement with a party (the DUP) which was the only party to canvass against the Good Friday Agreement (which formulated the peace in 1999) and who seem prepared to take the province of Ulster (6 counties of Ulster) out of Europe against the democratic will of the majority there.
So, a majority vote means Brexit in the UK but a majority means nothing in Remain voting Northern Ireland and Scotland who will certainly feel energised in having another independence referendum once the Brexit dust has settled. Where minority votes determine the future of the majority, the case for federalism makes itself.
That the 2017 referendum we were officially told -see AC Grayling https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2017/09/28/the-eu-referendum-was-gerrymandered/ was not legally binding and was purely advisory might come as a surprise to many voters but when MPs at Westminster voted by a large majority to trigger article 50 leading to the UK's departure, you have to wonder what's really going on in the UK and Northern Ireland. The referendum was originally promised to quell a far right revolt in the Tory party and lo and behold the people voted with their feet. Wales, the biggest net recipient of EU aid voted to leave the EU. Again, this speaks more to discontent within Wales with its Welsh Assembly than it does a desire to bite the hand that feeds it.
What's more, where is the (Gina Miller style) legal challenge to such undemocratic or selectively democratic chicanery?
It is also interesting that in this series of essays, the one subaltern (as Edward Said or Spivak might say) to speak back, Geoffrey Keating's 'History of Ireland' is castigated for certain important inaccuracies which he tried to propagate when creating his imaginary scenarios for early Irish (12thC) history. This correction is all well and good and necessary except that we do not see Froud or Ware's 'works', surely as venal, treated in the same manner. That these writers fall outside the historical moment under survey should not prevent the editors from at the very least commenting on the deafening silence of Irish voices in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
I think the Keating essay could occupy the centre of a trilogy of essays, the first addressing the general timbre of histories of Ireland that were available to Keating and to the reading public when he sat down to write, with the third being an account of what what was actually useful and accurate in his history. I say this with all due respect. Keating did not just happen in a vacuum.
A word in defence of Edmund Spenser. Spenser's 'View' has come in for criticism quite rightly but here and elsewhere people often (but not all) mistake the views of Irenius And Eudox. as HIS, Spenser's views, when in fact it seems very wrong and very obvious to conflate his views with what are characters in a fictional dialogue, even if it is based on realities on the ground. We have no way of really knowing what Spenser's opinions were. They may have been in fact more murderous than that suggested by his literary creations but to attempt to deduce or infer them from a dialogue seems like poor history. We wouldn't deduce Milton's views from the words he puts in the mouth of Beelzebub (though somebody did remark that Milton was of 'the devil's party').
The tendency to imagine Spenser as ventriloquising his own views really points to the dearth of material revealing precisely what his views were. I think finding that out would require more patient trawling through the dense allegories of the Faerie Queene (as Lisa Jardine suggests) as it is a tough road to travel without good reason. The big question which is never asked with respect to Spenser is Why it seems never to have occurred to him that while his Faerie Queene constructed the archetypal qualities requisite for the perfect knight, his own behaviour in Ireland contradicted the very paradigm he was constructing. Slaying the dragon is so much more noble if the dragon threatened you first.
Spenser must surely have anticipated the day when some bright young scholar would rumble him. When Darth Vader turned out to be Luke Skywalker's father, we had something like a narrative exposition of Jung's syzgy. An additional book to the Faerie Queene might, in a perfect world, see Spenser's knight likewise go native and defend the people of Ireland from Spenser's own brood. Carl Jung said that to withdraw one's projections, one's shadow, from one's neighbour was a significant act of great value and importance.
I suggest Spenser's canonical status might be one reason why characters like he and Cromwell and Raleigh remain largely undisturbed in their reified retirement. This is the timidity I referred to earlier. Just as old partisans are waited upon to die, so too a generation of historians and readers who revere Spenser.
What was Milton's view of Spenser's political tract on Ireland. What so worried Milton into condemning the Irish and the Catholics? This condemnation from the author of Paradise Lost whose strategy of discourse was to try to save fallen man, the reader, by helping him to relive the original Fall. It escaped Milton's awareness that condemning any group based on accidents of geography or parentage is tantamount to repeating that Fall from grace which he tried to save others from (see Stanley Fish). It is not very difficult or too far a stretch of the imagination to cast the Irish Rebels and the fallen angels of Paradise Lost as one.
Spenser's gift too was in the pay of the wrong party and while he was declared by was it Ben Johnson to be the poet's poet, his humble beginnings, the son of a cloth worker, perhaps prevented him from biting the hand that fed him. Shakespeare on the other hand, the son of a glove maker, enjoying none of the patronage, produced a drama that continues to be read today. (Spenser 1552, Shakespeare 1564).
Lisa Jardine's essay on Spenser adds information regarding a valuable heavily annotated document which gives us a better sense of Spenser's intellectual peers and their European perspective on how to colonise Ireland. (see Solon his Folie, UCC database). Her suggested siting of the Faerie Queen IN Ireland is refreshing and you have to wonder with her why previous generations of Spenser scholars have shied away from saying as much. (EL Carr is alive and well, it seems. Perhaps, I am wrong.)
The two essays on maps and map making are wonderful expositions, exposing the nuts and bolts and uncertainties of provisioning an army in a world of shifting sands and goal posts. The Down Survey, William Petty's survey of Ireland (see TCD database) is noticeable by its absence from these essays. I mention it as the Down Survey was the biggest Representation of Ireland's physical geography in its day.
Welcome also might be some commentary or sense that Ireland was in terms of many respects, mainly technological, behind England and that the inevitable spread of technology often accounts for what we refer to as colonialism and exploitation which though frequently mired in racial and religious terms, probably had little to do with these. Soldiers went where they were told to go. Administrators did as they were told, or often didn't as we often see in Ireland (and elsewhere) where adventurers free from the constrictions of English civility and law, simply misbehaved. The practice of Coin and Livery did not help.This is in no way to excuse the invasions, the wars and the colonisation but these crucial factors are the foundation stones upon which representations are erected and flags planted. It really should not fall to an ill-equipped and unfunded lay reader with few resources to point these things out.
I suggest Edward Said would certainly approve of a more engaged community of historians of Ireland. The introduction to these essays mentions that the book brought together English literary critics and Irish historians. Well, I'd like to hear back from other readers, after they have had the chance to read these essays, to say which methodological orthodoxy prevailed, if any?
I have omitted many excellent aspects of these essays, Sheila Cavanaugh and Julia Lipton's essays and a few more, Wonderful essays which I will read again. They represent an important start.
'To go forth for the millionth time and forge in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race' James Joyce.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/a-united-ireland-could-need-four-referendums-says-expert-1.4016125?mode=amp
So, do Historians of Ireland past and present have a special duty of care to publicly comment so far as their discoveries impinge upon the present? How much have things changed since 1993 when these essays first appeared?
Representing but not representative.
A wonderful collection of essays wherein Irish historians and English literary critics patiently examine the way writers in the 16th and 17th Centuries such as Spenser, Milton, John Davies, and other commentators, settlers, adventurers, and administrators describe[d] and/or represented Ireland and the Irish AND how it was that political expediency, personal ambition, unquestioned stereotypes and personal integrity inclined them to depict Ireland in a manner that suited them or their class, their conscience, or their political masters.
Probably NOT to be attempted without first reading Spenser's View of the State of Ireland, Pauline Henley's book on Spenser in Ireland, Ware's Introduction to Spenser, and any other historical background (Sir John Davies, Barnaby Rich, Googe) that will assist the reader's efforts to understand the period under review. After reading these books, Christopher Highley's 'Shakespeare, Spenser and Ireland' will further help to fill in the gaps, literary and historical. Andrew Hadfield's biography of Spenser and Nicholas Canny's 'Making Ireland British' are key texts (as is the work of Willy Malley and Brendan Bradshaw, editors of this book along with Andrew Hadfield).
For those who survive these works, Nicholas Canny's very readable (no footnotes 1983) 'From Reformation to Restoration' (which I have just begun) offers a more detailed analysis of what Gaelic Ireland looked like and sounded like during the period 1534-1660. If you can keep up with it, Canny's book should be read before these essays as it provides a kind of 'how we live now' of the Pale/Gaelic Ireland conjunction, critical to understand precisely what and where these essays are referring to, but if you don't know your Leitrim from your Longford, stick with the list mentioned earlier.
What emerges from these essays is an impression, limned in the Introduction, that English representations of Ireland were (or are) in fact 'English' representations of Ireland (sic), -an object-relational great-leap-forward for those in the business of deciphering what happens when two people meet or when two countries interact.
Though peripheral in many respects to the larger British Isle, Ireland remained intermittently central to British foreign policy. England's treatment of Ireland always had international, mainly European dimensions to it; the Act of Union for example was precipitated by the French Revolution, while the Emancipation Act (and the tabling of several Home Rule Bills) was eventually repealed (with the help of the Irish born Duke of Wellington) to contain or forestall a larger crisis. The invitation to William of Orange to rule England (the Glorious Revolution) had its origins in establishment fears of a return of a Catholic monarch.
In my opinion, Cromwell didn't go to Ireland to kill Irish people but to kill supporters of a Catholic King, supporters who happened to be Irish. It's an important distinction, not to mitigate Cromwell's guilt but to cast the conflict as a religious one. Ireland only discovered it was Catholic when Henry VIII declared England Protestant.
So, English identity has for eight hundred years been shaped in ways by its engagement with Ireland as its Significant Other, a by and large acrimonious marriage with both parties rarely on proper speaking terms, neither yielding to shows of power and neither willing to concede to the truth that no matter how much you may like to blame the other party, it is still your marriage and one without the possibility or provision of divorce or geographic separation.
-So far as drawing practical conclusions from these essays is concerned, conclusions that might speak to an improved Irish-British relationship in the present, the result of applying what one has learned to the complicated way different communities view each other, the lay reader is left to his or her own devices to divine solutions and imagine remedies that might relate to 'the origins of conflict' of the book's title.
It is roughly twenty six years since this book appeared (1993) and while the Good Friday Agreement of 1999 has brought a peace that has held, the prospect of a return to violence is very real as Brexit, the UK's decision to leave the European Union, has seen the possibility of a return of a physical border separating Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland.
-The editors of these fine essays felt obliged to mention 'the origins of conflict' in the title of this book but once mentioned, it appears, felt obliged not to mention them again...
Here we see history as it merges with the present. and the limits which historians are bound by so far as commenting on the present is concerned. So, the reader is left to do the heavy lifting to try to make sense of these essays as they relate to the state of play in Anglo-Irish relations today.
Symbiosis.
A phrase which helps to explain this object-relational anomaly / paradox (the one mentioned earlier) is that 'What is socially PERIPHERAL is POLITICALLY and symbolically CENTRAL, (to paraphrase Christopher Highley). This represents a profound truth. The injunction 'to do unto others' is, as any owl will tell you, as much about self preservation as it is to maintain good relations with ones neighbours. When we open our mouths to speak of objects in the world, we tend to say more about ourselves than we do the objects which are our targets.
In other words, what we say about others may indite ourselves, even where, as William Blake pointed out, 'a truth that's spoken with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent'. It isn't enough to have or possess the truth. It's what you do with it that will define you or your country over the long haul.
A concept first muted (I believe) by Sir John Davies in his remarkably frank and propaganda free (insofar as this is ever possible) commentary on English involvement with Ireland, is that successive English armies, viceroys, commanders were never given the sustained support they needed to subdue Ireland permanently, referring obliquely to how it was Elizabeth's administration always had one eye on those she sent to Ireland for fear that they would build their own power base there. The number of political and military careers that faltered or foundered or ended in Ireland is a great many more than might be expected. Essex, Perrot, Grey, Strafford, Raleigh were all part of the Irish enterprise. In other words, controlling Ireland wasn't just about controlling Ireland. It was indeed also about controlling Irish lords, the Butlers, the Ormondes, the Desmonds, the Boyles, the O'Neills, the O'Donnell's, the Burkes, O'Briens, and the FitzGeralds.
For the novice reader or person yet unfamiliar with the substance and content of these demanding essays (demanding in terms of things the reader is presumed to know) Gustave De Beaumont's much neglected book on 'Ireland, social, political and religious' offers a remarkably refreshing and largely dispassionate (non partisan except perhaps on the issue of the Reformation) account / overview of Ireland's history. Writing outside of the Anglo Irish sphere and in French, his straightforward narrative is a revelation in that, perhaps, he never seems to have to couch his language in terms acceptable to two constituencies.
It is a detailed book but which presumes little knowledge on the part of the reader, (in the same manner that his friend and travelling companion Alexis De Tocqueville managed in his study 'Democracy in America', and 'L'Ancien Regime', a study of the pre 1789 generation in France).
Beaumont's explains that Ireland's traditional lack of a central authority made it relatively easy for others to invade, yet that same power structure, the lack of a tradition of central authority, determined that it remained difficult to govern.
Beaumont seems to have consulted John Davies a lot but, writing for a different, more general audience, makes a real effort to assume little on the part of the reader whereas Davies is writing home as a civil servant to and for an informed audience.
Litton Falkiner's (early 20th C) essays on Ireland provide both general and specialised views of Ireland which are frank and fair. A moderate Unionist, his work might be read alongside John Pope Hennessey's (sometimes 'Hennessy') a moderate and reform minded Catholic who inter alia takes Raleigh to task for his contribution to Ireland. (John Eglinton's work is also very useful).
This leads to the question of historic objectivity with regard to the writing of history. The British historian EL Carr's 'What is History' insisted that historians are unavoidably prone to bias whether in their selection of materials or their interpretation of events. This may not seem like a revelation today but enshrining this finding as a maxim or will not and has not prevented historians of all ages from overstepping the mark. His is an interpretive guidebook, a book which advises historians to beware of their own tares, motes, and discursive stratagems.
I have no issue with individual historians who have to toe editorial lines but at some point the levee will break. If historians fail to connect evidential malign and pernicious socio-political representations to the origins of conflict, with a view to their prevention or curtailment in the present tense, the men of violence will continue to write their own history...
Historicism as a method or practice, as it is currently configured, omits any insistence of an 'Historical Present' in its five pillars (See Greenblatt and Gallager's 'Practicing Historicism'). I believe that Historicism, to become the effective method it aspires to be, must at least permit a more active public policy role for historians (as public intellectuals).
Today, to offer one telling comparison from the field of literary criticism, it is a universal lament to criticise the limited scope of what was known as New Criticism, an orthodox approach to literary texts popular in trans-Atlantic academia until around 1970, where the limited activity of 'close reading' was its touchstone and staple diet. The movement and its adherents refusal to countenance other readings, its insistence on upholding its position with respect to what it called 'the pathetic fallacy' prevented literary critics from drawing upon other supporting informational sources (biography etc.) to buttress or augment its investigation of texts.
I believe any limited methodological orthodoxy will go the same way New Criticism went, now seen as a narrow self serving methodology operated by and for literary Brahmins and grandees.
To take one practical example or potential application; currently, there is no functioning government in Northern Ireland (900 days and counting) as the marching season continued to perpetuate ancient stereotypes by parading sectarian banners as, meanwhile, soi disant Irish nationalists deface English language signposts around Ulster. It is one thing for historians to identify and lament the futility of demonising the Other as this series of essays lays bare but another thing entirely to do little about it.
We have something called Applied Chemistry and Applied Psychology but do we also need Applied History?
Surely, a group of wonderful essays such as these could include within its remit some neutral consensus driven commentary on the relevance of their essays to the historical present, (even if written in 1993). While I respect the limits imposed upon the various actors involved in this literary-historical enterprise, it seems misguided that the past cannot speak to a better future.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/12/loyalists-celebrate-victory-after-belfast-council-tried-to-ban-bonfire
I suggest this with the awareness that a prominent Irish historian currently (2019) advises the British government regarding the appointment of suitable persons to the British House of Lords; representatives who will no doubt play some role in Britain's 2019/2020 Brexit negotiations/debates with the possibility of a return to a closed border in Northern Ireland. I trust all is well with this selection process but today (18/08/2019) with the BBC's role being questioned/scrutinised in the press (Guardian et al) regarding questionable impartiality on the subject of its coverage of Brexit, it will be interesting to watch whether the media or academia play a more involved part in preventing the return of violence. That is what is at stake. Coverage of protests in Hong Kong and Belfast or Derry or Ecuador are not quite the same thing.
The port cities of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland the South East (London) are being taken out of the EU by a minority of the overall population who represent a slight voting majority in the 2017 referendum vote (Ag.49%-For 51%), threatening a return of the Northern Ireland border as the Conservative/Tory Party has a Confidence and Supply agreement with a party (the DUP) which was the only party to canvass against the Good Friday Agreement (which formulated the peace in 1999) and who seem prepared to take the province of Ulster (6 counties of Ulster) out of Europe against the democratic will of the majority there.
So, a majority vote means Brexit in the UK but a majority means nothing in Remain voting Northern Ireland and Scotland who will certainly feel energised in having another independence referendum once the Brexit dust has settled. Where minority votes determine the future of the majority, the case for federalism makes itself.
That the 2017 referendum we were officially told -see AC Grayling https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2017/09/28/the-eu-referendum-was-gerrymandered/ was not legally binding and was purely advisory might come as a surprise to many voters but when MPs at Westminster voted by a large majority to trigger article 50 leading to the UK's departure, you have to wonder what's really going on in the UK and Northern Ireland. The referendum was originally promised to quell a far right revolt in the Tory party and lo and behold the people voted with their feet. Wales, the biggest net recipient of EU aid voted to leave the EU. Again, this speaks more to discontent within Wales with its Welsh Assembly than it does a desire to bite the hand that feeds it.
What's more, where is the (Gina Miller style) legal challenge to such undemocratic or selectively democratic chicanery?
It is also interesting that in this series of essays, the one subaltern (as Edward Said or Spivak might say) to speak back, Geoffrey Keating's 'History of Ireland' is castigated for certain important inaccuracies which he tried to propagate when creating his imaginary scenarios for early Irish (12thC) history. This correction is all well and good and necessary except that we do not see Froud or Ware's 'works', surely as venal, treated in the same manner. That these writers fall outside the historical moment under survey should not prevent the editors from at the very least commenting on the deafening silence of Irish voices in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
I think the Keating essay could occupy the centre of a trilogy of essays, the first addressing the general timbre of histories of Ireland that were available to Keating and to the reading public when he sat down to write, with the third being an account of what what was actually useful and accurate in his history. I say this with all due respect. Keating did not just happen in a vacuum.
A word in defence of Edmund Spenser. Spenser's 'View' has come in for criticism quite rightly but here and elsewhere people often (but not all) mistake the views of Irenius And Eudox. as HIS, Spenser's views, when in fact it seems very wrong and very obvious to conflate his views with what are characters in a fictional dialogue, even if it is based on realities on the ground. We have no way of really knowing what Spenser's opinions were. They may have been in fact more murderous than that suggested by his literary creations but to attempt to deduce or infer them from a dialogue seems like poor history. We wouldn't deduce Milton's views from the words he puts in the mouth of Beelzebub (though somebody did remark that Milton was of 'the devil's party').
The tendency to imagine Spenser as ventriloquising his own views really points to the dearth of material revealing precisely what his views were. I think finding that out would require more patient trawling through the dense allegories of the Faerie Queene (as Lisa Jardine suggests) as it is a tough road to travel without good reason. The big question which is never asked with respect to Spenser is Why it seems never to have occurred to him that while his Faerie Queene constructed the archetypal qualities requisite for the perfect knight, his own behaviour in Ireland contradicted the very paradigm he was constructing. Slaying the dragon is so much more noble if the dragon threatened you first.
Spenser must surely have anticipated the day when some bright young scholar would rumble him. When Darth Vader turned out to be Luke Skywalker's father, we had something like a narrative exposition of Jung's syzgy. An additional book to the Faerie Queene might, in a perfect world, see Spenser's knight likewise go native and defend the people of Ireland from Spenser's own brood. Carl Jung said that to withdraw one's projections, one's shadow, from one's neighbour was a significant act of great value and importance.
I suggest Spenser's canonical status might be one reason why characters like he and Cromwell and Raleigh remain largely undisturbed in their reified retirement. This is the timidity I referred to earlier. Just as old partisans are waited upon to die, so too a generation of historians and readers who revere Spenser.
What was Milton's view of Spenser's political tract on Ireland. What so worried Milton into condemning the Irish and the Catholics? This condemnation from the author of Paradise Lost whose strategy of discourse was to try to save fallen man, the reader, by helping him to relive the original Fall. It escaped Milton's awareness that condemning any group based on accidents of geography or parentage is tantamount to repeating that Fall from grace which he tried to save others from (see Stanley Fish). It is not very difficult or too far a stretch of the imagination to cast the Irish Rebels and the fallen angels of Paradise Lost as one.
Spenser's gift too was in the pay of the wrong party and while he was declared by was it Ben Johnson to be the poet's poet, his humble beginnings, the son of a cloth worker, perhaps prevented him from biting the hand that fed him. Shakespeare on the other hand, the son of a glove maker, enjoying none of the patronage, produced a drama that continues to be read today. (Spenser 1552, Shakespeare 1564).
Lisa Jardine's essay on Spenser adds information regarding a valuable heavily annotated document which gives us a better sense of Spenser's intellectual peers and their European perspective on how to colonise Ireland. (see Solon his Folie, UCC database). Her suggested siting of the Faerie Queen IN Ireland is refreshing and you have to wonder with her why previous generations of Spenser scholars have shied away from saying as much. (EL Carr is alive and well, it seems. Perhaps, I am wrong.)
The two essays on maps and map making are wonderful expositions, exposing the nuts and bolts and uncertainties of provisioning an army in a world of shifting sands and goal posts. The Down Survey, William Petty's survey of Ireland (see TCD database) is noticeable by its absence from these essays. I mention it as the Down Survey was the biggest Representation of Ireland's physical geography in its day.
Welcome also might be some commentary or sense that Ireland was in terms of many respects, mainly technological, behind England and that the inevitable spread of technology often accounts for what we refer to as colonialism and exploitation which though frequently mired in racial and religious terms, probably had little to do with these. Soldiers went where they were told to go. Administrators did as they were told, or often didn't as we often see in Ireland (and elsewhere) where adventurers free from the constrictions of English civility and law, simply misbehaved. The practice of Coin and Livery did not help.This is in no way to excuse the invasions, the wars and the colonisation but these crucial factors are the foundation stones upon which representations are erected and flags planted. It really should not fall to an ill-equipped and unfunded lay reader with few resources to point these things out.
I suggest Edward Said would certainly approve of a more engaged community of historians of Ireland. The introduction to these essays mentions that the book brought together English literary critics and Irish historians. Well, I'd like to hear back from other readers, after they have had the chance to read these essays, to say which methodological orthodoxy prevailed, if any?
I have omitted many excellent aspects of these essays, Sheila Cavanaugh and Julia Lipton's essays and a few more, Wonderful essays which I will read again. They represent an important start.
'To go forth for the millionth time and forge in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race' James Joyce.
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